ring of fire: an indonesian odyssey

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Lawrence Blair with Lorne Blair an indonesian odyssey RING FIRE OF

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The true story behind the award-winning PBS television series, Ring of Fire charts the Blair brothers' 10-year sojourn through the world's largest and least-known archipelago - the islands of Indonesia. Amid impenetrable rain forests, erupting volcanoes and startling natural beauty, the brothers have captured on film and in words the story of one of the most captivating and intriguing explorations ever made. With extraordinary courage, humour and passion for the unknown, the Blairs draw us into a magical land where ancient myths still flourish.

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey

2ND Proof Title: Ring of Fire : EDM Job No: CD0210-82/4234

“Sets sails and sights for lands as unfamiliar and spectacular as anything dreamed up for a Steven

Speilberg movie. Thoroughly fascinating nearly every harrowing step of the way.”

- WASHINGTON POST

“Incomparable adventure teeming with thrills, chills, mystery and the bizarre.”

- LOS ANGELES TIMES

The true story behind the award-winning PBS television series, Ring of Fire charts the Blair brothers’ 10-year sojourn through the world’s largest and least-

known archipelago – the islands of Indonesia. Amid impenetrable rain forests,

erupting volcanoes and startling natural beauty, the brothers have captured

on fi lm and in words the story of one of the most captivating and intriguing

explorations ever made.

Their odyssey began in 1972 with a 2,500-mile voyage through the fabled

Spice Islands, in search of the Greater Bird of Paradise. A decade of further

exploration followed, during which the authors lived among the Asmat

cannibals of Papua and the healers of Bali, and encountered man-eating dragons

in Komodo and the elusive “dream wanderers” of Borneo. With extraordinary

courage, humour and passion for the unknown, the Blairs draw us into a

magical land where ancient myths still fl ourish.

Lawrence Blair is also the author of Rhythms of Vision. He has appeared

on television on both sides of the Atlantic and has lectured in psycho-

anthropology at the University of California. The late Lorne Blair worked for

the BBC until 1971, when he began his work as an independent fi lmmaker.

His fi lms, including the prize-winning Lempad of Bali, have appeared on

international television.

Also available: Ring of Fire, An Indonesian Odyssey DVD

www.indonesianodyssey.co.uk

Lawrence B

lair w

ith Lorne Blair

Lawrence Blairwith Lorne Blair

an indonesian odyssey

RING FIREOF

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Page 2: Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey

Published in 2010 byeditions Didier Millet Pte Ltd121 Telok Ayer Street, #03-01

Singapore 068590

www.edmbooks.com

Copyright © 1988, 1991, 2010 Lawrence BlairFirst published 1988 by Bantam Books

Cover design by Dean Allan Tolhurst

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written

permission of the copyright owners.

Printed and bound in Singapore

ISBN 978-981-4260-10-7

Generously supported by

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CONTeNTS

foreword 6introduction to Third edition 8

Ø Chapter One

A Land of Waking Dreams 15

Ø Chapter Two

Into the Ring of Fire 31

Ø Chapter Three

The Last of the Star Children 53

Ø Chapter Four

Spice Island Saga 83

Ø Chapter Five

To Haunts of Birds of Paradise 115

Ø Chapter Six

Life Amongst the Men of Wood 143

Ø Chapter Seven

An Island of Dragons 170

Ø Chapter eight

Dance of the Warriors 191

Ø Chapter Nine

The Dream Wanderers of Borneo 204

Ø Chapter Ten

The Shadow Play of Life 234

Acknowledgements 241notes 242Supplementary Reading 243index 244

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15

Chapter One

A L A n D o f wA K i n g D R e A M S

This is the story of 10 years of exploring and filming the steamy islands

of the volcanic Indonesian archipelago. It begins, inappropriately

enough, in the freezing winter of 1972… I was struggling to complete my doctoral thesis in an icy northern england when my brother Lorne called me from London with the news that Ringo Starr had agreed to

put up £2,000 and the post-production costs of our first adventure film.

I had spent three years researching contemporary mysticism, and it was

through John Michel, a colleague of mine who was an authority on Druid

mythology and the ancient sites of Britain, that I first met Ringo. Shortly

after the formation of Apple Films (a subsidiary of the Beatles’ Apple

Corps Ltd), Ringo and his associate Hillary Gerard had approached us

to help them make a film about Arthurian legends and ‘Magical Britain’.

Although this project failed to come to fruition – even with Apple behind

it – it was to lead us indirectly into more than a decade of adventuring in

some of the most remote regions of Indonesia.

Within three weeks I had handed in my dissertation, Lorne had

assembled the rudimentary equipment, and with more bravado than

common sense we found ourselves on the island of Celebes in the South

China Sea. From there we set sail with 16 fierce Bugis tribesmen on a

2,500-mile voyage through the Spice Islands in search of the Greater

Bird of Paradise.

For nine months amid storms and doldrums, we drifted amongst

forgotten kingdoms of silk and gold, fire-walkers, grave-robbers, pearl-

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R i n g o f f i R e

16

divers and pirates. eventually we reached the Aru Islands, close to the shores of west New Guinea, where we managed to record the first ever

colour footage of the golden-tailed bird in its natural habitat.

Of all the Birds of Paradise, the Greater is as rare and remarkable as

it is difficult to reach. For centuries before the arrival of Westerners, it

had been the symbol of the soul and of eternal life; and for the Chinese,

who traded with the southern islands long before the time of Christ, the

bird became associated with the phoenix myth, which crept across the continents into the mind of medieval europe, even before it was known that the world was round.

On finally seeing these creatures, mating in the high forest canopy

like cataracts of spun glass, we found them to be transparent with

a deeper meaning, with something which lay beyond them, in the

undiscovered wisdom of the islanders themselves. The birds proved

to be merely the lure which was to draw us into 10 years of adventure

through a land of waking dreams.

Just how we got involved in this way of life is still beyond me. I’m not

sure how we got here at all. Lorne, three years my junior, didn’t even

want to arrive. According to our mother, he was so late that she began

to suspect she had the hysterical pregnancy of all time. He received

his first report card when he was only four years old from a boarding

school in the South of France which domestic insecurities had required

our attending rather early in life. It consisted of just two words: ‘folle indépendance’ – which can fairly be translated as: ‘independence to the point of lunacy’.

Shortly afterwards we returned to english prep schools, where I quickly had my French beaten out of me in French grammar classes,

and where Lorne responded by continuing to be unable to talk or, rather,

to speak in any known language, for he would hold forth volubly in a

tongue uniquely his own. I was frequently called out of my classes to

interpret for him, and it began to be assumed that he would never talk at

all. But when we emigrated to Mexico as teenagers with our mother and

stepfather in the mid-fifties, he suddenly burst into articulate Spanish and english – and he later added French and Indonesian – all of which he used to protect and further his folle indépendance.

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A6. An entire village of some sixty three-story houses built like ‘space arcs’, erected just for the funeral and to be torn down afterwards in Toraja; A7. A Toraja princess watches the rites from her richly carved house; A8. Lawrence at Anak Krakatoa.

A6

A8

A7

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A9. The Cuscus, a pouched, tree-dwelling fl uffball indigenous to the islands east of the Wallace Line, makes a popular meal – but an even better pet; A10. The former chief of the Boutan royal bodyguard, who had personally defended his sultan’s life in hand-to-hand combat; A11. Surrounded by the balconies of Tau-Taus, the bodies of the dead lie in rectangular vaults hollowed out of the rock.

A10

A11

A9

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83

Chapter Four

S P i c e i S L A n D S A g A

The Bugis were amongst the great seafaring tribes of Southeast Asia.

Mentioned by Melville and Conrad, they were the scourge of the east Indiamen seeking the treasures of the Moluccas archipelago. They were the bejewelled and silken-turbaned villains who coloured the

pirate archetype of our Western imaginations, wielding their blades

and their sea-skills like demons, and bequeathing us their name for

our nightmares. Yet, long before we clashed, the Bugis had possessed

a highly complex written language, in which every letter looks rather

like the cross-section of a different but closely related spiral seashell.

They also had tales which recounted the trials and explorations of

their Sea Prince heroes who, through numerous incarnations, led their

tribal fleets through unknown waters and kingdoms of dragons and

witches, whirlpools and man-eating birds, and forests of half-beasts

and half-men. In length and breadth these sagas belittle our Iliads and

Odysseys, yet few scholars understand them and few have ever been

translated.

For a millennium or so the Bugis have followed the monsoon trading

cycle – surging east on the west monsoon all the way to Aru, at the

forbidding lip of New Guinea’s swamps, and west again on the east

monsoon beyond Borneo all the way to Sumatra.

They have fallen much from their early splendour, and are today really just roving gypsies of the eastern seas, though they ply their various trades in the only true ‘tall ships’ still sailing for a living – for

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R i n g o f f i R e

even the giant dhows of the Arabian Gulf are now powered by Perkins, Mitsubishi and Rolls-Royce engines. The Bugis’ prahus are a magnificent

hybrid between the original island boats and the 17th century Portuguese

spice-trading galleons. When Wallace embarked in one of these in his

search for the Greater Bird of Paradise, he described it as far preferable

to travelling in a first-class steamer of the time:

‘…how comparatively sweet was everything on board... no paint,

no tar, no new rope (vilest of smells to the squeamish), no grease

or oil or varnish; but instead of these, bamboo and rattan and

choir rope and palm thatch: pure vegetable fibres, which smell

pleasantly, if they smell at all, and recall quiet scenes in the green

and shady forest.’ 10

It was in these and these alone that we were determined to reach our

goal, for not only was our finance conditional on such a journey, but also

it might be the last opportunity for anyone to make this historic voyage

before the Bugis’ prahu were gone for ever.

We returned to Makassar from the Toraja highlands with dangerously

diminished funds, realizing that we had been in Celebes for two months

and that the chances of finding a prahu which could carry us the nearly

two thousand miles to the Aru Islands were remote. We had failed to

locate a single prahu master, or nakoda, who had been anywhere near

them, or had the slightest interest in doing so, and it was now so late in

the west monsoon that there only remained another six weeks before we

would no longer be able to depart without risking the winds dying and

starting to reverse themselves before we had reached our destination.

From our base in our waterfront digs, we spent many harrowing

weeks combing Makassar’s harbour, interrogating the scowling seamen

of every arriving prahu, and exploring the coastal villages with Abu.

Here we saw our first knife-fight which was clearly to the death, and

Abu hustled us away from the milling throng which surrounded the two

furious young combatants who rolled around like snakes in the dust

attempting to stab each other with their badiks, the seaman’s dagger

which few of the locals went without.

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115

Chapter Five

T o h A u n T S o f B i R D S o f PA R A D i S e

The night comes quickly. This sudden land

Never lends us a twilight strand’Twixt the ocean shore and the daylight night,Twixt the ocean shore and the daylight night,

But takes, as it gives, at once, the light. Punjabi Love Poem

As soon as it was dark we slipped gingerly out of Ambon and sailed softly south into the solitude of the Banda Sea. Any minute we ex-

pected to see an official powerboat bearing down on us with demands to

return to harbour, but as the stars grew more brilliant and the glow of the

town receded we were gradually suffused with elation and the closest

thing to comradeship we had so far experienced with our Bugis crew.

The night was very gentle, and the dark transparent sea was cleft at

our stern into two long green curtains of gossamer where our steering-

oars ignited the bioluminescence. With our sails and psyches barely

repaired from their ordeals, we now felt ourselves released into an ocean

of unknown delights.

It was time to celebrate. With a light breeze behind us, the mainsail

was at a 90° angle to our hull, and provided a perfect light-screen for the

projection of our slide-show.

The photographic image, even in newspapers and magazines, was as

rare as electricity in the Moluccas at the time, and none of our crew had

seen such a display of coloured light as we threw on Sinar Surya’s sail

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that evening. They all came to huddle aft of the mizzen, leaving only Tooth at the steering-oar and Tandri remaining aloof but nevertheless

fascinated by what we might reveal of our world.With our pocket-sized slide-projector, powered by the Honda gen-

erator purring away in the hold, we cast up the incongruous images we

had hurriedly bought on our departure from Heathrow months before. There was Queen elizabeth Trooping the Colour with the Coldstream Guards; the royal family waving pinkly and benignly from their balcony

at Buckingham Palace. There were cockney barrow-boys in the markets

of Soho, and their pearly kings and queens – the ‘rajas of the poor people’

– we explained to their satisfaction.

‘Those buttons’, Tasman remarked, ‘look like the mother-of-pearl shell which used to reach Makassar from the east.’

I agreed. ‘They might even have been brought by your great-great-

grandfathers from the Aru Islands, which once provided the world’s

finest mother-of-pearl shells.’

We had thought the photos of the Apollo moon landing would be our

trump card, but they were greeted with the mildest interest. In our earlier

attempts to introduce our crew members to the proportionate distances which separated europe from Indonesia, they had become indifferent to the distances which separated the stellar bodies.

‘So men go to the moon in rockets the way you two came from england in rocket planes?’ someone asked.

‘Why go to the moon?’ Tasman enquired.

‘Did the Queen go to the moon?’ asked Amir.

‘What’s on the moon to go there for?’ continued Tasman.

Some of them turned to regard the sickle moon which was rising over

the Banda Sea.

‘Are there still people living there?’

‘Well, if no one lives there and there’s only stones to bring back, why

go there?’ Tasman persisted.

Answering these questions taxed our ideologies as much as our grasp

of Indonesian, and we hurriedly projected more slides of the changing

of the guard at Buckingham Palace, until the show was interrupted by a

shift in the wind, and our screen was close-hauled to keep us placidly

moving towards the Banda Islands, barely 100 miles to the south-east.

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143

Chapter Six

L i f e A M o n g S T T h e M e n o f w o o D

Paper wraps stone,

Stone breaks scissors,

Scissors cut paper... sometimes.

The Bugis, too, have their ‘Boogie man’. The Aru Islands represent the

easternmost limit of the Bugis’ traditional monsoon trading cycle,

for beyond them lies the Belakang Tanah – the dark and dangerous ‘ends of the earth’.

The Bugis venture into the muddy shallows of the Arafura Sea only

in legend and nightmare, or if driven there by storm, for the sprawling

mangrove swamps of west New Guinea are the domain of a people

they fear as a tribe of skull-toting man-eating monsters. ‘Monsters’ is

a rather harsh description of the Asmat tribe of cannibal headhunters,

for they seldom reach five foot eight inches, but they’re nevertheless an

impressive lot, as we were to discover…

The Asmat are a wood-age culture, living amongst the estuaries of the

world’s largest and least-accessible alluvial swamp. The rivers which

snake through their mangrove forest daily rise with the tides to submerge

the entire area for up to 100 miles inland; and daily withdraw again to

expose nothing but mud, roots and crawling things – without a stone

to be found. For the pre-Stone Age Asmat, rocks are a vital magical

ingredient for certain rites, and are obtainable only at great risk through

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trade with the highland tribes. The value of stone is exceeded only by that of steel, an almost mystical substance which occasionally reaches

them in the form of hooks, knives or axes.

The word ‘Asmat’ means ‘Tree’ or ‘Wood’ people, for they are the

same word and, like their totemic creature the praying mantis, they are

the forest itself come alive. Legend tells how their creator, Fumeripits,

carved their first ancestors from trees which he then drummed into life,

standing back to watch them dance.

The Asmat also carve trees into which they drum the spirits of relatives

killed in battle with neighbouring villages. These spirits can only be

released through a vengeance killing. The carving of these spectacular

20-foot bis poles is part of an elaborate ritual which ultimately requires

the killing, beheading and eating of at least one retaliatory victim from

the offending village or clan. ‘Inhabited’ bis poles may stand in a village

for weeks or even years until anointed with the victim’s blood which

then releases their residents to eternal rest in the land of ancestors, so

the poles can be discarded to rot. More than mere carvings, inhabited bis poles are ‘living beings’ about whom the entire Asmat religious ecology

of revenge and regeneration revolves, but to museums and collectors

around the world they rank amongst the most valuable and coveted

examples of contemporary primitive art.

Nowadays it is rare enough either to be a bona-fide headhunter or

a cannibal, but to be both simultaneously is – at least to a snooping

anthropologist – a singular accomplishment. The Asmat were to achieve

world fame in 1961 when Michael Rockefeller, son of the late American

Vice-President, disappeared off their coast. He was last seen swimming

strongly for shore from his drifting open boat towards the nearby village

of Otjanep.

Michael Rockefeller was a child of the Steel Age: heir to the most

powerful clan of his nation, which had risen on the tide of oil and US

Steel. He studied ethnology at Yale and in 1961, aged 22, made his first

trip to Indonesian New Guinea (now called Irian Jaya) on a collecting

expedition sponsored by the New York Museum of Primitive Art. A

few months later he made his second – and last – trip to expand what

was already the world’s finest single collection of Asmat art (now at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). 14

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B6. The graveyard of Komodo is fortifi ed with cairns and chunks of coral to prevent the human remains from being unearthed and eaten by the Dragons; B7. On Sumba, three generations of Paus patiently await burial; B8. A Komodo dragon enthusiastically devouring a dead goat; B9. A pause as fi rst blood is drawn in the Pasola battle on Sumba.

B6

B7 B8

B9

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B10. The Punan guides don’t pitch camp, they build a house form scratch every evening, and abandon it again next morning; B11. Gajet with his bamboo poison-dart quiver at his belt; B12. A Punan maiden; B13. Bereyo, with our best hunter, Hidjau, mixing poisons for the blow-pipe darts; B14. The proboscis monkey of Borneo which, because of its long pink nose and silly face, the Indonesians call ‘Belanda’ – meaning ‘white man’.

B14

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We entered a pool of dream time, in which one event melted into another as we passed from household to household, to be spoilt, cross-

examined and passed on again. When our novelty wore off, our medicines

ran out, and our total inability to contribute food or any other useful

social activity became fully apparent, we continued to be tolerated with

affectionate sensitivity and inquisitive humour. I became very close to a

middle-aged couple called Gajet and Mera, who were still shaken by their

encounters with the overland Indonesian missionary scouts earlier that

year, who had even carried paint-pots and brushes through the forest to

leave murals of hellfire on their longhouse walls. On our journey inwards,

the mysterious Punan water-music, which few had heard and none

could describe, had become for ourselves and for our bearers an alluring

symbol of the lost forest maidens. Now, each dawn and dusk, the almost

frog-like booming rhythm produced by the girls’ skilfully cupped hands

beating the surface of the river sent a hypnotizing heartbeat through the

jungle and ourselves. After dark, several other musical instruments were

passed around to add their haunting sounds to those of the forest. There

was the nose flute, and two strange stringed instruments, the satung

and the sapeh. The former is merely a cunning resonating cylinder of

bamboo, with thin slivers of its own skin stretched over it to provide a

murmuring, lilting hum. The sapeh, or Dyak ‘mandolin’, is carved like

a miniature canoe, with three vine strings. The top string is used for the

melody, while the lower two act as drones, as with the Indian sitar. This

instrument produces a rousing light-footed sound which, for its similarity

to hillbilly music of the southern United States, we called ‘Borneo blue-

grass’. It was the sound of these instruments, perhaps more than anything

else, which gradually awakened us to the realization of having actually

reached the scent of paradise, a scent which had guided us through so

many Indonesian adventures, and quite suddenly one morning, like our

guides before us, we both wished for our own tattoos.

We approached the two couples who had earlier suggested we be

tattooed along with our guides, and were glad to find that their offer still

held firm – though they reminded us that this was a serious matter. We

could either choose from the glossary of Punan symbols, or else give

free rein to the shamanic art of the tattoo master, whose hand would

be inwardly guided to draw the design. Long past any sense of self

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t h e d R e A m W A n d e R e R s o f B o R n e o

229

determination in the matter, we both surrendered the responsibility of choice to the tattooists, rather as one might to a hairdresser.

They always work as a couple – a man (for whom it is taboo to draw

blood, except in anger) to trace the symbol, and a woman laboriously

to open up the wound and hammer in the dye. Our tattooists took less

than half an hour to paint the design on our chests, but their partners

took closer to six hours to make it permanent. I thought it was finished

after the first three, when I was asked to stand up and wash the blood off

my chest, but there was only a patterned pink wound, an eighth of an

inch deep, into which she went on meticulously to beat the carbonized

wood dye. This was achieved with a strip of bamboo tipped in Lorne’s

case with two semi-straightened fish-hooks, and in mine with two rusty

nails, which were tapped by a secondary hammer with the unwavering

precision and regularity of a sewing machine. During the more painful

moments, our skilled tormentors would cluck commiseratingly in our

ears, without altering their tempo. The ache, when we’d recovered from

the psychological impact, came not from the wound itself, but from the

glands beneath the armpits.

In our dazed state, and freshly instructed in how to surrender to, rather

than fight, the insect bites of the forest, it was a surprisingly painless

experience. It was with some astonishment that we afterwards stared

at each other’s angry carbon-stuffed wounds. Being the rather forgetful

‘doctor’ of the outfit, I now realized that our once quite sophisticated

medicine chest had long since been emptied of even its last plaster and

anti-malarial tablet. An extensive rummage through all my mildewed

pockets, however, revealed a few errant capsules of antibiotic powder,

which we superstitiously dusted over our chests as a magical potion

against infection. I had never been the slightest bit interested in having

a tattoo – or anything else which couldn’t be changed – yet the very

permanency of the act now seemed to exert its own irresistible attraction,

stronger even than the flattery of accepting the high honour of a Punan

tattoo, which is so seldom granted even to other Dyak tribes. Yet it has

neither faded nor worn out its welcome, and several years later, when I

was to rush from my burning home in Los Angeles, thinking that my tattoo

and the body it marked were all that remained of my eastern adventures,

it was still a comforting reminder of the dream wanderers.

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“Sets sails and sights for lands as unfamiliar and spectacular as anything dreamed up for a Steven

Speilberg movie. Thoroughly fascinating nearly every harrowing step of the way.”

- WASHINGTON POST

“Incomparable adventure teeming with thrills, chills, mystery and the bizarre.”

- LOS ANGELES TIMES

The true story behind the award-winning PBS television series, Ring of Fire charts the Blair brothers’ 10-year sojourn through the world’s largest and least-

known archipelago – the islands of Indonesia. Amid impenetrable rain forests,

erupting volcanoes and startling natural beauty, the brothers have captured

on fi lm and in words the story of one of the most captivating and intriguing

explorations ever made.

Their odyssey began in 1972 with a 2,500-mile voyage through the fabled

Spice Islands, in search of the Greater Bird of Paradise. A decade of further

exploration followed, during which the authors lived among the Asmat

cannibals of Papua and the healers of Bali, and encountered man-eating dragons

in Komodo and the elusive “dream wanderers” of Borneo. With extraordinary

courage, humour and passion for the unknown, the Blairs draw us into a

magical land where ancient myths still fl ourish.

Lawrence Blair is also the author of Rhythms of Vision. He has appeared

on television on both sides of the Atlantic and has lectured in psycho-

anthropology at the University of California. The late Lorne Blair worked for

the BBC until 1971, when he began his work as an independent fi lmmaker.

His fi lms, including the prize-winning Lempad of Bali, have appeared on

international television.

Also available: Ring of Fire, An Indonesian Odyssey DVD

www.indonesianodyssey.co.uk

Lawrence B

lair w

ith Lorne Blair

Lawrence Blairwith Lorne Blair

an indonesian odyssey

RING FIREOF

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